Statutory and financial records
The classes with a mandated retention period. Confirm the applicable period with your adviser and box by year and class.
Archive Storage in Dubai
An archive differs from document storage in one respect that matters financially: it is measured in years and it grows every year. Managing that growth is the whole discipline, and it belongs inside business storage in Dubai.
The failure mode is well known. A company boxes its back years, stores them, adds a year each January, never destroys anything because nobody is certain what may be destroyed, and ten years later is paying to store a decade of paper nobody can identify.
The fix is boring and it works: index at box level, write a destruction-eligible date on every box at the point of boxing, and review annually. That is the difference between an archive and an accumulation.
Setting a retention schedule you can actually run
Start from the legal requirement, which is a question for your accountant or legal adviser rather than for us — retention obligations in the UAE vary by entity type, by mainland or free-zone status, and by record class, and we deliberately publish no figure here.
Then add your own commercial requirement on top, which is usually longer for contracts and shorter for routine correspondence. The result is a schedule with perhaps five or six record classes, not fifty.
Apply it at the point of boxing rather than at the point of review. A box that arrives with a destruction-eligible date already on it needs a decision once, ten years early, when someone still knows what is in it. A box reviewed cold in 2034 needs someone to open it and work it out.
Then diarise one review a year. It takes an afternoon and it is the only thing standing between a managed archive and a decade of unexplained cartons — which is what document storage becomes without it.
What goes into a long archive
Contracts and agreements
Usually kept longer than the statutory minimum for commercial reasons — a contract's useful life outlasts its retention obligation.
HR and payroll files
Sensitive, and subject to your own data-protection obligations, which storage does not discharge. Box these separately from general records.
Project and technical records
Drawings, certifications and handover documents, often needed years later and almost never indexed well at the time.
Archive hygiene that pays for itself
- Uniform box sizes. Mixed cartons rack badly and the same paper costs measurably more space.
- One index, in your systems, not only in ours. An archive you cannot audit independently is a liability.
- Destruction-eligible date on every box, written at boxing.
- Separate anything containing personal data, and know which boxes those are.
- Scan the small number of records you actually retrieve, rather than retrieving them repeatedly.
- One annual review, diarised. Without it the schedule is a document rather than a practice.
Boxes that are eligible for destruction should actually be destroyed. Ask us to arrange it — the point of the schedule is that the archive gets smaller sometimes.
Common questions
The horizon and the discipline. Document storage is boxes offsite; an archive is boxes offsite with a retention schedule, an index and an annual review. Without those three, an archive is just paper that grows.
Confirm it with your accountant or legal adviser. It varies by entity type, by mainland or free-zone status, and by record class, and we will not publish a number for it — a wrong figure on a storage provider's website is worse than no figure.
Ask us to arrange it when a box reaches its destruction-eligible date. The reason we ask you to write that date at boxing is precisely so this can happen without someone having to open the box and work it out years later.
They remain subject to your own data-protection obligations, which storing them offsite does not discharge. Box them separately and know which boxes they are, because that is what makes a subject request answerable.
It is billed on space at AED 12.65 per sq ft per month, VAT included. Four hundred boxes is roughly 160 square feet. For volumes above that we would rather survey and review the index than quote from a box count.
Yes, and most customers do it every January. The addition is a small collection; the useful discipline is doing the annual destruction review at the same time so the archive does not only grow.
More in Business Storage Dubai
Everything below is part of the same service — pick the page that matches what you are storing.
Document storageBusiness records held offsite and retrieved on notice.Office & relocation storageFit-outs, downsizing and the gap between two office leases.Free zone company storageStorage for flexi-desk and free-zone companies with no premises.Inventory storageStock held with counts that reconcile to your own numbers.
Archiving a decade of paper?
Set the destruction dates before the boxes leave. It is ten minutes a box now and an afternoon a box later.
+971 50 577 3388 · support@safestorage.ae · from 12.65 AED per sq ft, VAT included